Do we always need to feel at home?

Where we are bitten and where we are drained

there we descend.

Small creatures sting repeatedly.

[To be] devoid of essence is poison.

-Atharva Veda

“I feel at home in the forest” were the words from one of the women in my programs who was invoking Matangi, the outcast Deity of the forest. This person is a lover of Nature and enjoys long bushwalks. The possibility of encountering snakes or similar dangers does not worry her, she said. I invited her to consider whether Matangi invites feeling home in Her cosmos or whether we impose our paradigms of homeliness on Her...

We yearn for being at home. Perhaps this is the singular most intense yearning of our lives. We search for places, people, communities, and ideologies that will acknowledge who we are in our deepest sense of being and mirror this to us. In a contemplative domain, this is often proposed as solitude and quietude, like a solitary bushwalk where one does not have to distort oneself to fit external expectations.

Home is idealized as a refuge and a safe place. When we are assailed by troubles, we may retreat to the bastion of home there to recover and to find our strength. This homeliness becomes a metaphor for retreat in a larger sense—a retreat from mundane life to meditate or to rest from the vagaries of the world. Refreshed from the healing space of home, we may venture out to face another day.

In archetypal invocations, home, like everything else in the mundane world, takes on many nuances. A home is not a pre-created space into which we simply step. It must be fashioned with exertion, discernment, and passion. It is, like everything else in the archetypal world, a multi-dimensional constellation that must be invoked into existence. It does not offer a binary reality that is cleansed of one side of this duality—that is, it is neither safe nor dangerous but a dance between the two. The invitation here is whether we can be at home in the unfolding of a multi-dimensional Reality rather than constructing "homely" spaces which do not participate in this flow.

Matangi is the outcast Deity who inhabits the wild of the forests. An outcast is someone whom the village has exiled. The village considers an outcast transgressive in terms of their world view and values. Therefore, Matangi does not affirm the value of our mundane reality. It is unlikely that She will assist us in our quest for the home of our mundane expectations. Matangi’s invitation is for us to learn to experience home in the primordial truth of Reality, or existence as it is in its wildest expressions within and without us.

Matangi is elusive and unpredictable—like the forest. When we think of forests we think of curated nature parks with well-maintained pathways for visitors. Many of us have no experience of the wildness of the wild. We mostly have fake wilderness, rinsed of the ferocity of the wild, and sold to us commercially. Most of us will never encounter the virgin wild where a human has never set foot.

There is a dance movement associated with Matangi’s sister Goddess of the south called Valli (creeper). In this movement, the invocation of a creeper is combined with the deadly sting of a scorpion. Creepers cling to the earth or to trees and their movement is shaped by the tree and the earth. They sometimes conceal caves. They may conceal within their tresses a scorpion that kills you even as you trustfully step into their softness. Thus the Deity as creeper is shaped by the primordial rock, soil, and wood, conceals the innermost secrets of Her cave (Yoni), and harbours venom within Her alluring grace.

Ancient hymns extol venomous creatures such as snakes and scorpions. They are the hidden dangers of the wild. One hymn speaks of the scorpion lurking within the luscious grasses of fields. To be at home in these places is to discern and encounter the hidden danger within beauty and grace.

Ferocity is the underpinning sensation in a dance invocation of such Deities. For me ferocity is not fearlessness, rather it is the ability to be in the presence of fear. Fear is inevitable in a wild that conceals and is unpredictable. We cannot encounter what we do not know without fear. Indeed, a good dose of fear is a reasonable and intelligent experience in this context. Ferocity, that sensation that connects us to our grounded Bodily strength (Shakthi), is what helps us contend with fear and death in the form of the venomous undercurrents of even the most beautiful forest and field.

Feeling at home in Matangi’s wild is to ride the tiger. Matangi is also invoked as Durga, the Deity who rides the lion or the tiger. The tiger here is not a tamed circus animal or the tragic domesticated pet that helps its owners become social media stars. Encountering the wild is to meet it at its mysterious source. The tiger between the Deity’s legs is the ferocity located in the primordial realms of earth, water and fire which are in the lower Body. This is the cosmos of industry, fashioning, and artistry. The ancient potter is the archetypal Creatrix fashioning material offerings from earth, water, and fire. We ride the tiger when we invoke these elemental expressions and fashion our Bodies as their manifestation.

A ferocious Deity may not be homely. She meets the wild at its mouth, neither confronting, nor killing nor domesticating. It is an agreement between the wild and the Deity that is poetry and dance. They conjoin in a primordial choreography that is an uneasy association of two divergent natures. Equally, each of them manifests this uneasy co-existence of incongruent natures within themselves. Matangi is both ferocious and comely, and the snake is both sensual and venomous. Their dance is a multi-dimensional constellation of disharmonious elements within each of them and between them. This is not a sweet duet, rather it is a dangerous interplay between two unpredictable and mysterious forces.

This interplay of essences or Rasas is life in its essential expression. A dance of this kind is not an ensemble of people doing the same movements choreographed as machine-like unison. I notice how much of our popular dance is of this kind of large-scale choreography of perfect unison. I enjoy this as much as anyone else, however it does assign to dance a very narrow expression in the popular imagination. In an interplay of Rasas, there can be collision, disharmony and even chaos in terms of our expectations of unison as harmony. It is a microcosm of Nature and Reality where divergent essences co-exist to manifest the rich tension of plurality.

Relinquishing Rasa or essence is tantamount to death. When we abandon our essence to try to belong, to find a home, or to escape ostracism, we may as well be dead as far as Rasa philosophy is concerned. In the lines quoted above, encounter with the wild’s venom is inevitable even when we feel we have escaped the wild in our villages. This is because the wild is not just out there nor is it erased by our village building enterprise. The wild lurks within us and in the bones and marrow of the seemingly indestructible systems we have created in our villages. Being stung by a scorpion or being bitten by a snake is unavoidable even in our concrete covered realities.

A venomous sting is an invitation to descend into our own elemental essence, our primordiality or our sap. It is a reminder of the oblique, the contrary, and of that which belies all our cause-effect control mechanisms. These are moments in life when events simply baffle us with their dystopian nature. In the times in which we live, it is no longer possible to pretend that our harmony project has not ended in dystopia. It feels as if all the scorpions and snakes have been let loose to run amuck in our villages!

The invitation in the hymn is to be the mysterious coming together of incongruence, which is the poetry of disharmony rather than the homely comfort of harmony. The physicality of Indian dance manifests the poetry of simultaneous movements of the Body each having its own realm of initiation and flow. In holding these elements together, alchemical expression of mystery takes shape. The nature of Reality’s choreography is revealed in this constellation thereby inviting us to interrogate our pre-existing principles of harmony.

I have found that when I hold inherited ideals of being at home, I am forever seeking a material expression of these ideals. Or I simply delude myself into believing that I inhabit such ideal domains. In these situations, I am sapped of my vigour. I am a passive consumer of somebody else’s narratives of life.

Perhaps for some of us the ideals match our experiences. That is not my experience. I have complex experiences of home and family which include ostracism, betrayals, and other destructive events. Home for me has been Matangi’s forest where poetry and danger have co-existed in equal measure. Perhaps that is why a contemplative philosophy that invites a relinquishing of ideals and ideologies in favour of exploration, creativity and expression has always attracted me.

To be at home in our Body is to dance with the hidden creatures whose smallness conceal venom that can kill us. As the lines of the hymn quoted at the beginning of this essay states, it is the essence (Rasa) of these small creatures to sting and to sting repeatedly. They do not act with an inimical intent. It is also the nature of Reality/Deity to conceal the scorpion within their flowing creepers.

When we contend with Reality at the Rasa level, all our measures of value are rendered irrelevant. An invocatory philosophy invites contending with our unease in the face of this dystopia. This is the contemplative descent into our depths where our Rasa is hidden in the waters of our being. The venom, as the hymn sings, is only the beginning of a journey towards our essence and its dance which is unlike anything we have known and will ever know. Home is this invocatory movement—alert, industrious and poetic.